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Doug Engelbart's Legacy of Innovation Inspiration

The message of Doug Engelbart’s life is that you, too, can build a better mousetrap. Engelbart, the inventor of so much more than the pointing device for which he’s famous, died last week at 88.

But business innovation is too important to be left solely to the brilliant. You can be your very own Engelbart, if you step away from the keyboard long enough to stop multitasking and start thinking. Envisioning what might be doesn’t require special skills so much as it does the ability to look at the world the way it really is.

So shed your most tightly held perceptions, jettison the received wisdom of others, and forget what couldn’t previously be accomplished. Fresh eyes inspire fresh thinking.

That’s what Oracle cofoundersLarry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates did in the late 1970s, when they recognized the business potential of the relational database. That heritage of innovation continues today, with home-grown advances such as the ultrafast SPARC T5 processor, the new cloud-optimized Database 12c, and engineered systems that accelerate analytics and big data.

Engelbart’s mouse, built in prototype form in 1964, was in fact the first step in his vision for how the modern modality of computing would emerge. In his day, programmers keyed their code onto punch cards, delivered the resulting decks—if they didn’t drop them on the floor first—to the data center, and waited for their batches to be processed.

In 1968, at the Fall Joint Computing Conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed how that achingly slow, serial process could be replaced by workstation-based, interactive computing. The complete, hour-and-a-half presentation—which has been dubbed “the Mother of all Demos”—was filmed and can be seen here. Users’ ability to control processing resources at their fingertips would begin its rise to ubiquity a decade later.

It’s true that most advances don’t arise from flashes of brilliance inside the brains of geniuses like Engelbart or Thomas EdisonEdison. For most of us, insights arise that help us make progress via baby steps. That’s fine; improving a program, user interface, or sales methodology may not make you famous, but it’s innovation enough to bring you job satisfaction while helping your company.

To help focus such creative fires, which burn inside many of us, prescriptive methods—OK, bullet points—have emerged from those who’ve experienced and studied the process of innovation.

Engelbart himself was involved in the creation of “Bootstrapping Innovation,” which the institute bearing his name defines as “a distillation of Doug Engelbart’s strategic vision put to practice. It is essentially the same strategic approach he applied in his own research team for breakthrough results.”

Its five principles are:

Engage and network your innovators.

Leverage collective IQ with dynamic knowledge ecosystems.

Focus beyond product or service on whole capability and genuine need.

Use an evolutionary approach to push the frontier.

Walk your talk to bootstrap results.

Just as there are shelves packed with self-help books, there are many choices if you’re looking for the steps to simmer an innovation stew. As Bob Evans noted last fall in “The Hunt for Innovation: 10 Strategic Insights,” OracleOracle sponsored a study, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, on how companies cultivated business-led innovation. The survey of 226 senior executives uncovered six successful strategies:

Reach across business units for innovative ideas.

Engage customers in product development.

Look to disruptive technologies to foster innovation.

Learn from mistakes.

Make innovation a management priority.

Take a tactical approach to promoting innovation.

It may be true that you can’t checklist your way to innovation. However, the principles above provide a framework to help you take the jumbled ideas in your head—perhaps poorly formed, but rife with possibilities—and discuss them with your colleagues.

However, remember that others may be less excited about your insights than are you. That’s OK; successful innovators seem to be obsessive about their ideas, taking them forward despite obstacles or setbacks. Thomas Edison famously tested some 1,600 materials before he found a filament that glowed brightly enough and lasted long enough to make his lightbulb usable. (Edison also had his own five-point list of what he called “the competencies of innovation.”)

Sadly, innovators—like us all—must one day sail into the sunset. Yet, through their contributions, they’ve achieved a kind of immortality. Everyone knows of Edison. Engelbart’s inventions, known mostly among the computer cognoscenti, nevertheless touch every person, every day.

What future innovations are taking shape in your mind? E-mail me here or follow me on Twitter at @awolfe58.

For Further Information

Want to watch some business innovators in action? Then check out Oracle’s Innovator’s Playbook series of webcasts here.

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